Mike McCahill 

The Year and the Vineyard review –a playful dig at Spain’s hellish past

This absurdist time-travel diversion might have been pitched as Bill and Ted's Land and Freedom, writes Mike McCahill
  
  


Idiosyncratic indie rover Jonathan Cenzual Burley follows 2011's road movie The Soul of Flies with an absurdist diversion that might have been pitched as Bill and Ted's Land and Freedom: the tale of a bearded International Brigade recruit (Andrea Calabrese) who tumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum and winds up in latter-day Salamanca. In a pointed inversion of comic form, it's the moderns who prove more guileless: credulous Catholics who need reminding of their country's hellish past to better appreciate the present. Meanwhile, the blast-from-the-past wanders the striking landscape, haunted by memories of a now-lost love. Burley's latest reminded me of Hal Hartley's The Book of Life – which had Jesus and the devil show up in pre-millennial Manhattan – while translating that film's cool anomie into a fresh, playful, increasingly affecting bonhomie.

 

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